MONTREAL — There was a seven- or eight-minute stretch at the Bell Centre Monday night when hockey turned on the after-burners.

Forget the clutch-and-grab. Forget the trap, because you can’t trap what you can’t catch.

For that stretch, the Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins played almost without a whistle. They sizzled. They flew. They took every spare inch of ice and turned it into a centimetre. They piled up hits like the Beatles, circa 1963. With that monster crowd all around them playing levitate-the-roof, they took hockey to a whole new level.

It doesn’t get better. Not in the Olympics, not in the Stanley Cup final, not anywhere hockey is played.

There have been years when the Habs and Bruins met in the playoffs and neither team was all that good. Not this time. This is a heavyweight battle between two powerful, talented, well-coached teams and the result is the kind of hockey that could bring a tear to the eye of the most jaded sportswriter.

No matter who wins Game 7 in Boston, the real winner is hockey. This is what it’s about: speed and barely controlled violence and knife-edge tension, all in the confines of a rink that seems dwarfed by the sheer size of the game.

When it was over Monday night, the Canadiens had lit up this city as nothing else can. Even on a night with a cool breeze whistling through the downtown streets, crowds of redshirted fans were everywhere, bellowing their delight.

As a team, the Canadiens haven’t played like this in a long while, not since the last Stanley Cup parade had to be diverted from the usual route to avoid yet another riot. Led as usual by P.K. Subban, Brendan Gallagher and Carey Price, the Habs took it to the bigger, stronger Bruins in every corner of the ice — including the corners, with special emphasis on belting Milan Lucic and Zdeno Chara at every opportunity.

They got terrific defensive work out of Alex Emelin and Andrei Markov. Nathan Beaulieu, playing his first game in more than a month, looked like a talented veteran. Michael Bournival showed why coaches are going to love him. Veterans Brian Gionta and Tomas Plekanec donated everything but their livers to get a win.

Carey Price did what he does: stay calm, make saves. He pitched a shutout, the fourth of his playoff career, all against the Bruins, and he made it look easy.

The Canadiens even got goals from Max Pacioretty and Thomas Vanek, sparking the line of the night from colleague Don Macpherson, who wrote on Twitter: “That was the part where the two good guys you thought had been killed early in the movie suddenly turn up alive.”

Thomas Vanek of the Montreal Canadiens controls the puck as he looks for an option against goaltender Tuukka Rask of the Boston Bruins. (Francois Laplante/Freestyle Photography/Getty Images)

Vanek, truth be told, was having a pretty good night before he scored. Pacioretty wasn’t — and when he isn’t scoring, the big guy can drive you nuts.

While Gallagher is in there battling with the big trees and trying to count the goalie’s nose hairs, Pacioretty hangs back. A friend of mine suggested that maybe Pacioretty avoids the net because he was a fish in another life.

When he gets a puck on his stick with a goalie in front of him, however, Pacioretty is every fan’s dream. The speed. The hands. The knack for finding a hole that is little more than a rumour.

You wish that Pacioretty, who is 6-foot-2 and 217 pounds, had a little more Gallagher in him, more of that mysterious drive that propels the 5-foot-9, 180-pounder toward the net no matter how many times he is chopped, cross-checked, kicked, tripped, elbowed, punched and issued parking tickets for putting down roots in the crease. But Pacioretty is more Patrick Kane than Milan Lucic, so you have to settle for what you get — a guy who can shoot the puck and score. There are a number of those guys in the Hall of Fame, so you could do worse.

Now we’re headed to Game 7, with Boston coach Claude Julien saying flatly, “we’re going to win” while Michel Therrien took a more cautious route: “Anything can happen in a Game 7. That’s the beauty of it.”

Head coach Michel Therrien of the Montreal Canadiens talks to his team during a timout in the second period during the game against the Boston Bruins in Game 5. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

To win it, the Canadiens are going to have to play like they did Monday, when they were lining up to hit the biggest, most intimidating Bruins: Zdeno Chara and Lucic. They are going to have to match the speed they showed in Game 6, when they came out with the Skate-O-Meter set on “fly” and didn’t let up.

Pernell Karl Subban, who must have had a pretty good birthday as he turned 25 Tuesday, said it all: “It’s going to be great. I can’t wait for the crowd, the noise, the energy in the building. I can’t wait to take that all away from them.”

Now Subban is smart enough to know a comment like that will enrage the Bruins. He’s also smart enough to know that the Bruins have spent six games trying to put a square hit on that No. 76, without success. If they get to running around chasing him, they’re beat before Rene Rancourt butchers the anthems.

It promises to be a dogfight you can tell your grandkids about. We’re picking the Canadiens in a game that will be closer than an elevator at a garlic convention. If the Habs can take out Boston, however, they can also take out either the New York Rangers or the Pittsburgh Penguins in the conference final.

The fearless prediction, then, is that your Montreal Canadiens are going to the Stanley Cup final for the first time since 1993. Beyond that, our crystal ball gets downright foggy.